Fortresses and Fiends

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Post by Koumei »

This looks good. I get that it'll be ages before it's in a playable state, but so far it looks solid, and if it does get completed, I'll probably want to try running it at some point.
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Post by nockermensch »

I misread the thread title as Fortresses and Friends and then got disappointed by the absence of ponies.
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Post by Kaelik »

nockermensch wrote:I misread the thread title as Fortresses and Friends and then got disappointed by the absence of ponies.
But there are ponies. They look like this:

Image
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Post by RobbyPants »

Kaelik wrote: But honestly, everything Mistborn says is something he learned from the hundreds of threads we already discussed game design here, so it shouldn't be surprising that it has a fair amount of overlap. But yes, it has Tiers, like we discussed as being something that should happen in every fighter thread, and Black Forest, it has four stats, because we've bitched about how Con sucks and the mental stats are dumb several times over for more than a decade, and it has a damage system/condition track that borrows a lot from CAN and SAME. Because of course it does, because we've been talking about game design for over a decade on this forum, and sure as fuck some of it was going to end up in here.
Honestly, I'd assumed most people here who are kicking around a fantasy heartbreaker are doing the same thing. The one I've been jotting down brainstorming notes is pulling from various threads over the last four years or so from here. The one I attempted eight years ago did the same thing, then.
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Post by Orion »

Constructive tips first:

--Maybe instead of talking about "hybrid procreation" you should be talking about "conversion" (hybrid conversion, fiendish conversion, whatever). Or possibly "augmentation."

--Why perpetuate this 3-18 charade? Why not just let abilities run from +4 to -4?

--What is the point of HP boxes if there's an "injury" condition track? Why not either make every attack do conditions and only conditions (with some conditions being KO's), or every attack do both "stress" and conditions, or have every condition contribute toward a "KO Threshold" while it's in effect?

--"Survival Tier" is a weird name for a tier that appears to assume that you have access to a fortress to shelter in and that there's a half a tier worth of people who suck worse than you.

--Some people will want to do "dragon people" or "demon people" characters whose supernatural nature is initially latent, but awakened at a higher tier. You can do this totally adequately by having them start as a Human Warrior or Human Wizard or whatever and then take a Demon-themed Prestige Class at level 7, and let them declare they have red skin or whatever. You could also throw these people a bone in the form of a badtouched race or specialization option.

Now the rant. This is some kind of joke, right? Your big plan is to combine the character- and setting-design innovations of 4th edition D&D with the weirdest and stupidest monsters from 3rd edition at levels way too low to even interact with them?

--So the setting is Points of Light, except possibly also Points of Darkness, because the Fortresses may or may not produce vitally important resources, fuck it, who knows? You can exchange stuff for other stuff at fortresses except for the ones that kill you on sight or exist only to take your stuff, which is most of them.

--The primary design will create level 3-7 character to explore a world dominated by fiend factions whose iconic members start around CR 9 and have large numbers of "fuck you" abilities.

--Your primary stat will add to the "attack" and "damage" rolls that are actually your "do stuff to enemies" rolls. You will max it out, because obviously. You can choose to have one primary stat, or, if you hate yourself, to have 2 primary stats instead.

--The mandatory prestige classes will be locked to specific base classes, except they're not. The transforming monsters are special prestige classes that will presumably be stapled on any base class for a mix of stupid good and just plain stupid results. Other prestige classes will sometimes be open to more one class also, making them either secretly several entirely separate classes with the same name, or stupid as per above.

--You're re-writing all the spells, but importing all the D&D monsters defined by their lists of spell-like abilities.
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Post by Kaelik »

Orion wrote:--Why perpetuate this 3-18 charade? Why not just let abilities run from +4 to -4?
I suppose you could always read the thread... Or not, whatever.
Orion wrote:--What is the point of HP boxes if there's an "injury" condition track? Why not either make every attack do conditions and only conditions (with some conditions being KO's), or every attack do both "stress" and conditions, or have every condition contribute toward a "KO Threshold" while it's in effect?
1) all the conditions end on a KO. To the extent that Panicked is a KO, blinded is too for enemies who rely on sight (usually more prevalent than ones not immune to fear).

2) Some attacks will do conditions, some will do damage, some will do both. These are the kinds of different things that exist as different choices to make fighting monsters with different resistances to different condition tracks and damages the kind of game I want to play, instead of just the one where you use your attack to attack because it's the only attack you use.
Orion wrote:--"Survival Tier" is a weird name for a tier that appears to assume that you have access to a fortress to shelter in and that there's a half a tier worth of people who suck worse than you.
Survival Tier is about going out and struggling to get the money to be able to keep living in your Fortress (or going it without if you want to, I guess).

Adventurer Tier is where you go out because you want to, not because you have to.

Rulership (might need slightly different name, Founding?) is about building your fortress.

Epic/whatever is about leveraging your fortress(es) to change the world.
Orion wrote:with the weirdest and stupidest monsters from 3rd edition
I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that if you think Slaads, Devils, Demons, and Inevitables are stupidest monsters in 3e, then Fortresses and Fiends isn't for you.
Orion wrote:at levels way too low to even interact with them?

...

The primary design will create level 3-7 character
Where the fuck are you getting this from? No really. Where in the thing that says PC levels are 3-18 did you decide that levels 8-18 didn't exist. Now, right away, the part where you think lower level Fiends don't exist is weird on a number of levels, because they do, but, the game clearly has levels 3-18 listed as the playspace.
Orion wrote:--So the setting is Points of Light, except possibly also Points of Darkness, because the Fortresses may or may not produce vitally important resources, fuck it, who knows? You can exchange stuff for other stuff at fortresses except for the ones that kill you on sight or exist only to take your stuff, which is most of them.
So basically, you were going to complain about the setting no matter what was in it? I mean, I guess that's good to know, but I'm not sure how that helps your argument. You seem to simultaneously not understand the setting, and at the same time hate everything it could possibly ever be (which is everything, because you don't understand it) and that really puts your criticism in a weird as fuck place.

I mean, sure, there could exist people who just really hate the idea of giving creatures an explanation of why they are where they are (the fortresses part), and there can be lots of people who don't like the Fiends part, because they don't like fiends. But you aren't articulating a very compelling criticism here.
Orion wrote:--Your primary stat will add to the "attack" and "damage" rolls that are actually your "do stuff to enemies" rolls. You will max it out, because obviously. You can choose to have one primary stat, or, if you hate yourself, to have 2 primary stats instead.
1) If you can read at all, you would know that your primary stat probably won't be adding to attack at all.

2) What stat adds to damage will depend on a number of things, including what ability you use, but it's usually the case that you are going to have abilities that scale off of both stats tied to your class.

3) You don't get to choose to have one primary stat instead of 2, that's dumb, which is why people don't get to do that.

4) This is a really dumb criticism to have when you don't know what class features people have, so you have no idea what benefit they get off of their secondary stat.

5) Of course you will max your "primary stat" the default fucking generation method is fucking array, you have an 18 you have to put some fucking where, and by the act of putting it in a location, you will pretty much guarantee that is the stat you consider primary.
Orion wrote:--The mandatory prestige classes will be locked to specific base classes, except they're not. The transforming monsters are special prestige classes that will presumably be stapled on any base class for a mix of stupid good and just plain stupid results. Other prestige classes will sometimes be open to more one class also, making them either secretly several entirely separate classes with the same name, or stupid as per above.
Wholly shit, what year are we in? Ignoring for the moment that you have not the faintest clue what any prestige class abilities do, are we seriously in a universe where you are going to get mad that throwing a dart at a board and deciding that the elementalist turns into a vampire doesn't create equally as powerful a character as picking a vampire ninja? Yes, some monsters will be slightly better for some classes than others. Of course, frankly, when you are talking about 5-10 out of 50-75 or so prestige classes, that's really not a big deal to me. Vampire Ninja will be balanced against other ninja options, but will have abilities that would even help a warrior, and they will progress casting, so yeah, they are probably not going to be taken by Wizards looking for their SFV or Dragon Sorcerers, but if they are, it's not the end of the fucking world.
Orion wrote:--You're re-writing all the spells, but importing all the D&D monsters defined by their lists of spell-like abilities.
Again, I can only question why you don't read the thread. Obviously the monsters are going to be rewritten, since hey, when you look at them, last I checked they all have 6 stats. I specifically said they have to be rewritten. But if someones going to ask for a list of the names of things that PCs are going to be fighting at certain levels like Grek, then of fucking course I'm going to refer him to the names of existing things, because the names will probably be the same.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

To be clear, your reason for the 3-18 thing was a pile of total steaming bullshit.

For instance... "I want abilities scaled to 3d6 so I can deal damage to them with like maybe d6s and stuff. Why do I want to do that second thing? NO FUCKING REASON!"

Seriously. It's just grognard for grognards sake. Which is fucking odd because the one place people might want to roll old school style damage, you know, actual HP damage, you don't what you DO do is unclear due to what looks like a fucking tragic typo followed by a fucking tragic failure to commit to ANY even preliminary numbers. But we do know it involves fucking soak rolls. Ick. On everything. Double Ick. And multiple distinct non-stacking condition tracks to victory (WTF? we KNOW those do not work).

But really that's the sort of thing where your entire system falls down. It's a random grab bag of utterly inexplicably selected grognardy sacred cows combined with a random grab bag of the dens most failed and unfinished ideas. Your ability mechanics in general? What single fucking thing do they do that actually improves on the well known fundamental underlying flaws of attribute systems? Fucking nothing, your standard array, stated ability roles and a rigid (and crazy) class system unavoidably generates the same fucking identical warrior character (or the same fucking wizard character) EVERY god damn fucking time. Though ACTUALLY you talk about classes having "Secondary" as well as primary attributes... so with your point buy mechanic actually every character probably comes out "18,18,12,12".

Well hurrah on that, advancing us to... actually a worse fucking position than 3.x ever was at.

In fact... while we are here your claim that the primary attribute never adds to attack is fucking bullshit. You flat out claim it does in several places. So what if "soon" you "just add level instead". That just raises two questions, 1) So... all this stuff about classes having two major stats for their fucking abilities is a lie then? Is it all REALLY "soon" just level to everything final destination the end? and 2) What THE FUCK makes you think just adding level to everything is a good fucking idea? But even if you have a reason... then why EVER sometimes briefly maybe who knows add anything else? What is the point of even having attributes at that point at all?

As for your class system interactions with monster classes... wait a second fucking monster classes? Actual racial classes hey? One of the most fucking basic and terrible mechanical FAILURES of D&D history. Seriously you are going to take like the worst idea in D&D and just run with it along with an explicit goal of "Half Demon + Wizard, FUCK THOSE LOSERS! Demon class ONLY stacks with SWORDY McSWORDY CLASSES!" Did you learn fucking NOTHING from savage species? Apparently not.

Where is the progress in this... disgrace... where is the improved player choice? You can't even support a Half Demon Wizard by explicit intention and even if you did his stat array would be 18,18,12,12 (sorted by primary,secondary,other, other) and it wouldn't even matter because (probably at level 4+ all his attributes are "soon" suddenly just "=level" forever because apparently he wasn't sufficiently identical to every other character of his class selections ever.

I think a legitimate modern RPG that gets to declare any progress whatsoever has to meet certain FUCKING BASIC tests that your proposal not only fails, but fails openly and flagrantly.

1) Any class+any race works. And yes ANY MONSTERS THAT CAN TAKE CLASSES ARE FUCKING RACES for the purposes of this test. And also yes, A LOT of your fucking monsters should be able to take fucking classes.
2) Your class selection does NOT mandate a single specific arrangement of attributes. Ideally it does not even mandate some subset of attribute selections, but at the LEAST it should offer SOME fucking choice.
3) Any prestige/advanced/whatever class or even any selectable option you are permitted to take with a class works in combination with that class.

Your basic premise of a system in proudly deciding not to do those things inevitably means you are founding your system on a plan to do little more than generate trap option after trap option after trap option.

Something one MIGHT have hoped a den inspired game might I don't know, even try and avoid.
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Post by MGuy »

In one of the race threads( don't remember the name) Lago claimed he was against racial determinism and at some point the idea that level should eventually render attributes useless was introduced. That's probably where the attributes into level idea came from.
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Post by Kaelik »

MGuy wrote:In one of the race threads( don't remember the name) Lago claimed he was against racial determinism and at some point the idea that level should eventually render attributes useless was introduced. That's probably where the attributes into level idea came from.
Actually, that's not it. Since races don't effect stats, level for attack does nothing to change racial determinism at all.

Level to attack is just because there really isn't a good reason for PCs to have different attack numbers, either between characters, or between attacks on the same character (unless the attack itself is some form of power attack type thing that has lower accuracy in exchange for more damage/greater chance to inflict condition).

Instead, the game ensures that certain classes have certain attributes higher than others by tying it to the damage roll and class features. Since all Wizards are going to have higher Int than everything else, they are gong to have the best Perception saves, since all Sorcerers are going to have Charisma, they will have the best willpower saves. Technically, if I was willing to have like 10 different progressions for saves, I could emulate that without attributes. But then I would lose out on assorted attribute penalty mechanics, which I also want to include as alternative win conditions, useful penalties, and a source of resource depletion.

Right now, pretty much the only main thing that the level or attribute thing is doing is making many low level animals and similar low level monsters hit about as often as slightly higher level PCs. Which is why I have an asterisk next to the rule, since I'm not sure that alone is sufficient justification, and/or that there isn't a better way around that.
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Post by MGuy »

Alright. Sounds reasonable to me.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

I don't understand why Kaelik thinks it is bad to have attributes effect attack bonus specifically and exclusively (for more than a little while, still WTF) but fine for them to effect damage output and "other stuff".

I mean, either variable attribute based bonuses are good... or they are bad. If they are both at once... we need a rational explanation for that or at the very least some idea of where and why the fuck he thinks he is drawing that line. Which we don't have.
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Post by Sigil »

I have another question based on my own musings on fantasy heartbreakers. Since you're rewriting the system from scratch, how do you feel about the rules in 3e/3.5 for objects (hardness, etc)? They become largely meaningless at higher levels, but I've always found them to be lacking enough information, to just be somewhat contradictory to actual experience at low levels where it might be legit important if you're able to break a door/wall/McGuffin using physical strength or damage, and to just be weird (sonic damage ignores hardness for objects, regardless of material type, etc).

I feel like by expanding the base rules that cover interaction with objects to 1 to 2 pages, you could provide rules that covered broad classes of materials (wood, stone, flesh, bone/chitin, metal, crystal, etc) and provide a table that showed what types of damage were or were not effective against material. It might also be helpful to provide a set of modifiers to represent the objects construction (solid, layered, mesh, etc). You could provide a chart that listed common hardnesses and hit point value for different materials so that you could quickly figure out how an attack affects an item.

This is extremely nitpicky, but I felt it was worth asking since you're going to be rewriting all the systems.
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Post by Kaelik »

Sigil wrote:I have another question based on my own musings on fantasy heartbreakers. Since you're rewriting the system from scratch, how do you feel about the rules in 3e/3.5 for objects (hardness, etc)? They become largely meaningless at higher levels, but I've always found them to be lacking enough information, to just be somewhat contradictory to actual experience at low levels where it might be legit important if you're able to break a door/wall/McGuffin using physical strength or damage, and to just be weird (sonic damage ignores hardness for objects, regardless of material type, etc).

I feel like by expanding the base rules that cover interaction with objects to 1 to 2 pages, you could provide rules that covered broad classes of materials (wood, stone, flesh, bone/chitin, metal, crystal, etc) and provide a table that showed what types of damage were or were not effective against material. It might also be helpful to provide a set of modifiers to represent the objects construction (solid, layered, mesh, etc). You could provide a chart that listed common hardnesses and hit point value for different materials so that you could quickly figure out how an attack affects an item.

This is extremely nitpicky, but I felt it was worth asking since you're going to be rewriting all the systems.
I am certainly doing significant rewrites of the object system. One thing I'm considering is having hardness scale with thickness (capped of course), in addition to HP per thickness. But yes, I see what you mean about having different materials take different kinds of damage, a brief outline of common materials interactions could be helpful, I'd have to take a closer look to see what differences I can see to be worth classifying. But yeah, I think there is a fair amount of improvement to be made in object classification and interaction.
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Post by tussock »

PhoneLobster wrote:I don't understand why Kaelik thinks it is bad to have attributes effect attack bonus specifically and exclusively (for more than a little while, still WTF) but fine for them to effect damage output and "other stuff".

I mean, either variable attribute based bonuses are good... or they are bad. If they are both at once... we need a rational explanation for that or at the very least some idea of where and why the fuck he thinks he is drawing that line. Which we don't have.
That's not true, things can be both good and bad, most everything is, in that poison is a matter of dosage, though a few things are bad at any level. There's quite wide ranges of where most things are noticeably good and then later with more they become toxic, like water.

Same with stat mods to stuff. It's fun, in a game, to hit about 70% of the time or whatever, so you get clearly more and longer chains of success than chains of failure, but still enough failures that they don't become surprising and thus memorable.

And at the point where your stat mods to hit might change that number for some people into a 55% and others into an 85%, and that's bad for both of them. Where with damage and "other stuff", it's just not a big deal and you can let them have their stat mods and play a "strong" or "wise" character and have that mean something, which is a good thing.
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Post by Sigil »

Kaelik wrote: I am certainly doing significant rewrites of the object system. One thing I'm considering is having hardness scale with thickness (capped of course), in addition to HP per thickness. But yes, I see what you mean about having different materials take different kinds of damage, a brief outline of common materials interactions could be helpful, I'd have to take a closer look to see what differences I can see to be worth classifying. But yeah, I think there is a fair amount of improvement to be made in object classification and interaction.
I don't necessarily think hardness needs to scale with with thickness, but HP should scale more appreciably for walls than it does in stock d20. You can feasibly hew through a wall as long as you have a harder tool, but it does take a significant amount of time. A "reinforced masonry" wall that's a foot thick could believably have thousands of hp for a 5 foot segment, but as listed has a measly 180 hp and 8 hardness, meaning a level 1 guy with 18 strength and a greatclub would, on average, get through it in about 9 minutes (51.42 rounds).

The object system was one of the few things I actually put a decent amount of work into when working on my heartbreaker, and if I recall I settled on a formula of (Base HP value from material) x (Modifier from size category of object OR thickness of barrier) X (Modifier for construction) = Final HP

I also made sure that all of the special materials (mithril, darkwood, whatever) had the relevant information so you could plug them in at higher levels of play.

You'll have to decide where on the spectrum of realism you want things to fall, 10 minutes to break down a masonry wall might be reasonable for your game, but for a game that focuses to a good extent on "fortresses" you probably want walls to be a major impediment.

Edit: Of note, when I google "Reinforced Masonry" I mostly get images of brickwork with steel rods inserted vertically through the wall, they're pretty much all modern images, but I did assume that the the SRD was probably referring to something similar.
Last edited by Sigil on Thu Jun 23, 2016 2:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

tussock wrote:That's not true, things can be both good and bad,
I DID say they can be both... with a rational explanation as to the drawing of the line.

Your explanation is flawed (seriously? "Too much is a bad thing, so switching to the FASTER PROGRESSION of level instead of attribute bonus is clearly... wait a minute...!"). But more importantly it isn't even Kaelik's explanation for the exceedingly odd and complex decision of sacrificing attribute relevance, character differentiation and everything else on the altar of ???? for attack bonuses and attack bonuses alone.
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Post by MGuy »

He said he wanted attack bonuses to not vary much between characters, beyond risk/reward decisions like power attack, or different attacks on the same character. He said he feels there's no real reason to have that vary. I don't have a reason for them 'to' vary so whatever. I don't see why you want to be worried about that particular decision or even his decision to instead have attributes effect other things.

We do know he's doing attribute damage to facilitate alternative loss states so there's a good reason to have larger vs smaller attributes just to give variant weaknesses and strengths. I don't really know how good that idea is as I've seen arguments that suggest its not and in my own musings I continue to struggle with how to deal with alternative lose states without making the extra rules cumbersome, encouraging (or necessitating) that everyone be on the same one or two tracks, and things like that. We simply don't know what he's going to do exactly and so I think it'd be better to wait.

I really don't see the reason to froth at the mouth over what's in this thread, at least not until he has more stuff down for everyone to look at. There're people who are farther along (and have numbers) with their material. Why not go ranting about one of those instead until this idea matures a little more?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

MGuy wrote:I really don't see the reason to froth at the mouth over what's in this thread
I don't know, considering that he has done things like specifically declared an actual intention to deliberately gimp anyone who combines "Half Fiend" with "Caster", and considering he has a plan to implement racial/monster classes, which I remind everyone IS the worst idea in D&D, I think there ARE some foundational goals and methods that are worth attacking right now.

No amount of finalized numbers fixes explicitly and deliberately sticking the middle finger up at half fiend wizards for no reason as a day one design goal.
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Post by MGuy »

PhoneLobster wrote:
MGuy wrote:I really don't see the reason to froth at the mouth over what's in this thread
I don't know, considering that he has done things like specifically declared an actual intention to deliberately gimp anyone who combines "Half Fiend" with "Caster", and considering he has a plan to implement racial/monster classes, which I remind everyone IS the worst idea in D&D, I think there ARE some foundational goals and methods that are worth attacking right now.

No amount of finalized numbers fixes explicitly and deliberately sticking the middle finger up at half fiend wizards for no reason as a day one design goal.
I'm not that surprised by it. There was at least one fiend class in the Tomes (that I can recall) so it's not new. I'm not one for Monsters being Classes but it's not a concept that was deemed unacceptable in all cases.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

MGuy wrote:... it's not a concept that was deemed unacceptable in all cases.
Almost NO idea, however stupid has failed to have it's supporters on the den. Sometimes prominent ones in their worst moments of irrational contrariness. Monster classes however have failed to ever have any coherent defense put forward and have been arguably one of the biggest monumental failures of D&D, and specifically the biggest failure to learn from from the edition of D&D that Kaelik is working from as his inspiration. Generally when improving on a thing you do not simply repeat it's greatest failures or worse, as it looks like, double down on them.

But perhaps rather more specifically I'm pretty sure that "This is one of the core setting races and it is a monster class that says fuck you to any class combination that doesn't involve directly smacking stuff" is NOT a SPECIFIC circumstance under which it is likely to be deemed acceptable by anyone who isn't totally fucking crazy.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So what is a game that's done "PC's can play as monster and adventure alongside classed humanoids" adequately?

I've seen it the most often in RIFTS but that's a game where nobody cares about balance or leveling up.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

OgreBattle wrote:So what is a game that's done "PC's can play as monster and adventure alongside classed humanoids" adequately?
Aside from mine? Who knows. But the point is this is supposed to be progress and that is right at the TOP of the fucking progress agenda. The player masses don't give a shit about your minor spell description tweaks, THEY want newer better options for the roles they can play.

The further point is that this is not just failing to be the perfect, this is NOT just "the imperfect", this is flat out fucking retrograde. It's failing to meet an ideal, then failing to meet the (historically failed) compromise of a monster class that is actually versatile, deciding to call the failure intentional and then deliberately screaming up yours at a vast array of potential character class/race combinations on top of that.

There are arguments to be had about dealing with various monstrous races as being a hard thing to do in various ways. You do NOT get to have that argument about fucking half fiends you especially do not get to have that argument when you make them one of the CORE races that you inexplicably decide to hang your bullshit setting off of.

You want to argue imperfect progress. Fine. But you don't go doing that by moving backwards and then putting the result front and center as a core poster child of your game and setting.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:56 am, edited 3 times in total.
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momothefiddler
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Post by momothefiddler »

Okay, so I don't like race-as-class aesthetically. The general way D&D works is that you choose a combo of the two and your column gives you some minor benefits based on what you are and your row gives you most of your level-based power based on what you do. Race-as-class muddies that, conceptually, and I find that awkward and inelegant. And as an autistic mathematician, I highly value elegance.

It also means that you can't be that race and still get superpowers from what you do, and that's gonna upset whiny pissbabies. This is an important note for any designer, because when you're making RPGs, your prospective playerbase is saturated with whiny pissbabies.

But really what it boils down to is that in a level-based game where there attempts to be some balance of power, you can't have people getting their superpowers from being a wizard and minor effects from being a dwarf while other people get superpowers from being a wizard and more superpowers from being half demon. You have to say no to that somehow.
D&D 3.5 decided to say no to ever getting superpowers from being half demon, in that any appreciable racial power was accompanied by hamstringing LA+RHD with some gratuitous extra fuck you bits here and there because fuck you. (Of note are Lesser races and similar, wherein you can't have half demon superpowers but you can have red skin and horns that don't give an extra attack or anything and that's just as good, right?)
Race-as-class declares that you can get half demon superpowers, you just can't have them at the same time you have wizard superpowers. It also leaves room for wizard superpowers + red skin, so it's not getting rid of any options, just adding a new one.

See, as far as I can tell, the primary argument against race-as-class is along the lines of "fuck you I want half demon superpowers AND wizard superpowers and you're taking away my wizard superpowers!" when, in fact, having both was never really on the table.

To be clear, I still don't like it aesthetically and I'm aware that adding more options isn't necessarily good for a game. I just don't think that "They're takin our jobs classes" is a reasonable response, and it's clear that there are arguments for race-as-class.
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RobbyPants
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Post by RobbyPants »

Sigil wrote: Edit: Of note, when I google "Reinforced Masonry" I mostly get images of brickwork with steel rods inserted vertically through the wall, they're pretty much all modern images, but I did assume that the the SRD was probably referring to something similar.
One or both of the 3E DMGs show a black and white picture of stone work with iron straps affixed to the outside.
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

On the balancing 'advanced races' with normal races, I've seen ideas floating around that the advanced races take up item slots - a normal race is upgraded with magical items to essentially remain equivalent to an advanced race - and actually be more customizable. If you're not using equivalent item slots, I wonder if you could achieve some of the same effect by using feat slots (assuming 1/level or similar). An initial feat could give you the physical appearance and minor powers (similar to other feats) and open up access to a list of racial feats.

A half-demon could be a 'normal dwarf' with the 'half-demon feat' at 1st level, and at 2nd level might pick up the 'fiery aura' feat, followed by 'bat wings' at 3rd level.

Is that type of system better or worse than race as class?
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